Jeff VanderMeer - Dead Astronauts

That one time. In that one place. With Moss and Grayson preoccupied and Chen a fortress-sentinel.

“I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. You were just a dream I had. A dream I made. That’s all you are.”

Chen had trembled, tamped down the urge to dissolve and in that dissolution take Charlie X into the dark with him.

For that would be surrender.

Moss had put forth the rules to govern Chen’s more useful equations. Moss’s “tidal pool rules,” which included: Stay still, be small, bring the right camouflage, know good hiding places, become a symbiote or parasite, be poisonous or venomous, be able to regenerate body parts.

If you wanted to survive, reduce all motion to zero over long stretches of time. Trust the current. The current. The current. The species already there. How at high tide the water rippled across all of the tidal pools, even those that had been inviolate, their own tiny kingdoms, before.

If this were the purest City. The one that most rippled through all the others and the Source. If this was the one, then the effect would be greatest here.

But: Be tiny, be motionless. Take your time. Perhaps it would not be the first wave or even the thousandth. Because direct was defended. You contaminated the wall of globes inside the Company, then went to the Source. The portal wall, the magic mirror that led back to where the Company came from. You let it trickle in, like a slow-acting poison that was actually:

Life, again.

She could feel herself, sometimes, using the tidal pool rules to do the things she wasn’t doing here . Phantom sensations. Of standing in the ravine. Of watching her doppelgänger set off, with Chen by her side.

Memory of Grayson turning to her and saying one of these three things:

“This time. This time. I feel it.”

“Someday. We’ll go back to your tidal pools.”

“How many times has it been now?”

Say a number that felt low. That felt hollow.

Like one of Chen’s equations was screaming to get out. Like one of Chen’s creatures, trapped in the wall of globes.

for you cannot give us

what we already have

In this City, as in all Cities, the three knew they would find the foxes. Moss loved the foxes, while Grayson suspected them—thought them already too clever, believed, perhaps, the foxes had led to their failures, as much as the insidious nature of the Company had.

Chen had no opinion, for in his calculation the foxes must always be part of the plan. So he wasted no emotion on them one way or the other.

On a cracked dead bridge splayed in segments across a riverbed of rocks and weeds, the fox met them. They had been clambering across the gully, headed southeast, toward the Balcony Cliffs apartment complex. They wore now their camouflage, so that they appeared only as a glimmer against whatever backdrop they moved across. Faery mode , Moss liked to call it.

In a sense, the fox had ambushed them by taking the high ground of the bridge. This startled them. It had never happened so soon, or in this place.

The blue fox stood perfect-still, regarding them. It was as large as a wolf and Grayson felt the threat of its regard. Could see with her eye the peculiarities of its brain. Just could not tell if the fox had been born that way or tinkered with.

“You are a long way from home,” the blue fox said.

“This is our home,” Moss replied.

“Not all of you. Not this City. Our City.”

“The Company’s City.”

“Not forever.”

Moss was their receiver, and it was through Moss that Chen and Grayson heard her parlay with the blue fox.

“Will you accept a gift from us?” Moss asked.

“I accept no gifts from strangers.”

“But we aren’t strangers. You know us.”

Moss was letting the blue fox into her mind. The farther into that labyrinth the fox explored, the more of the gift the fox would receive. For it would understand their mission, gain more understanding of the Company, and also see how the foxes had helped them across so many Cities. That was the hope.

(What bled through, into the head? Where did they travel all unknowing? This in Moss’s mind as disturbance, registering in Chen as a possibility: v.2.1 = 2.2 + 2.3 + 3.0 + the things that could pull a mind apart if examined close up.)

“Neither shall I set foot on strange paths without a map,” the fox said or thought, and in real time it was neither but an image the fox showed Moss—of the fox come to a halt at the entrance to a dark green maze of vines, and the maze was Moss and the fox would not enter the maze. And Moss put this image into words for Grayson, for Chen.

Words ripped smooth by repetition. What Moss had said many times before: “The Company will kill you without our help.”

“The Company already kills us, and yet we are here.”

All around, from every hiding place, peered the sandy-colored small foxes that were the blue fox’s comrades.

“We can make it easier, faster, for you.”

The fox considered that, looking out over the City as if the fox would rule the City one day.

“I will give you this much: There is no Moss in this City. No Moss at all. You should consider that before all else.” Moss by then was a conduit as well as a person, and even as a person she was an accumulation of Mosses, all of whom lived inside her. Every time Moss encountered another Moss, across timelines, they merged, and she had become more powerful because of it.

Then the fox trotted off the bridge, out of sight, and his followers melted away as if they had never been there.

“That has never happened before,” Chen said. He had noticed how the fox looked covetous at Moss, as if she were a tasty morsel. That had not happened before, either.

“Give it time,” Moss said, even though Time was a joke. Even though they had less of it with no Moss in the City. No new partner, no new joining.

“How much time do we have?” Grayson asked.

(What came back to Chen was how 7 became both lucky and finite, not a door but a wall. Without an anchor at 6.999999999999. But the fox was the master of it and thus in a way Chen could not see in the numbers … their master, too.)

As they met the fox ever earlier, so too would the Company be drawn to them that much faster. This they knew. And Moss knew one thing more the other two did not: that she would see the fox again, soon.

I think you are beautiful , Moss thought hard, at the space the fox had disappeared into. I think you have always known the future. I think this time I might trust you .

But she always had done that in the past, too. Because she meant it.

Where had the blue fox come from? The vexing question, the one they had stopped trying to answer. Moss said that the blue fox had not been born in the Company or borne by the Company, or they had so forgotten it that there was no residue. A rogue lab, Chen guessed. Or some spontaneous mutation. Neither probable.

Moss believed: The blue fox was aware of its brethren across all the paths. Moss believed: The blue fox often knew them before first encounter.

Once, Grayson, after analyzing the blue fox and finding only … fox … pressed the creature.

The fox replied, “I came from where you come from, Grayson. I come from up there .”

The sky. The stars. The leap of startled recognition in Grayson before she realized the fox was joking. That the fox was telling her she had been read , down to her core.

“How do you know?” Grayson had asked. Could not help that reveal.

“You stink of space,” the fox said. “You stink of stale air and the burn and countdowns to false zeros, and places not of Earth.”